


pyrrhic victory

by soundthebells (kosy)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Elias-Typical Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Gen, POV Second Person, Pre-The Unknowing (The Magnus Archives), Relationship Study, beholding powers, post-MAG106, tim asks for the real memories of sasha and it goes about as well as you’d expect, vague references to MAG162
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:01:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23673502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells
Summary: Don't make a deal with the devilsounds like an obvious rule until the devil has something you really, really want.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 96
Kudos: 203





	pyrrhic victory

**Author's Note:**

> cw for character death, violence, grief, brief instances of body horror, and emotional manipulation, though none are worse/more intense than in canon. thank you for reading!

You spend a night lying on the carpet in your living room staring at the ceiling. Light from the television flickers over the cracked, dirty white plaster, though your eyes don’t track the movement, the shadows. You have other things to consider. The sofa is right next to you, running parallel, but you don’t lie there instead. That would legitimize what you’re doing too much. It would make it a choice instead of just something that’s happening to you. Passively. As fucking always. At least this time you’re choosing the passivity with every moment you spend here on the floor. You blink only when your eyes water. You feel sick to your stomach but that’s nothing new. That’s how it is now. 

(You asked Jon, after. If he had any tapes of her voice. You’d wanted a fight. You’d wanted to raise your voice, slam your hand into a wall. You wanted pushback. Bloody knuckles and a throat scraped raw. 

He didn’t push at all, just looked at you a long, long moment with flat dark eyes and then said slow and quiet as if coming out of a dream, “Yeah. I-in my office, if you want to listen to them.” You curled and uncurled your fingers, phantom anger, and nodded tightly. 

You listened. He didn’t even meet your eyes until the tape was done, whirring away into silence and that too-familiar click. You don’t know what you were expecting. A revelation? Some barricade in your mind crashing down, the fucking walls of Jericho? You listened. It was a woman’s voice. _—I think there’s someone here. Hello? I see you. Show yourself._ Just a voice. Not as you remember it. Not so different as to be shocking, but there’s no confusing them; one is the voice of a stranger and one is—

Is—?) 

You spend a night staring at the ceiling. You really should try and fix the cracks, those hairline fractures, but you know you won’t. Even as they spiderweb the wall, even as the old building creaks in the night, even as other tenants find better places and move out. What’s one more danger? What’s one more death? 

You’re trying to remember her. It’s not working. You knew it wouldn’t, and you told yourself you weren’t trying it even as you knelt unsteadily and sank down onto the rough beige carpet. Of course you were. 

Elias said it altered your memory. Said if he showed you a picture of the real Sasha now you wouldn’t know her face. 

(There was a polaroid photo that had fallen into the crack between your nightstand and your bed. One of her birthday celebrations. Her and you and Martin and even Jon crammed into the same booth. She’d insisted on the polaroid, and you’d teased her for being so committed to the retro aesthetic while Martin had gazed at the old-fashioned camera with unmasked envy. Photo-you stares at her with such open adoration it twisted your gut to look at it. You found it a month or so after Elias told you what happened, had scoured your whole flat looking for it. You had to know. 

He was right.

You haven’t thrown out the picture yet. Keep it facedown on your kitchen counter. Every day before you leave, your hand hovers over it. Every day before you leave, you pull away and keep walking and pretend you never paused at all.

You want to throw it out. You’re going to throw it out. You’ll do it tomorrow. You can’t keep dwelling on it like this. You have to throw it out.)

(You’re not going to throw it out.) 

So, no. You don’t expect to remember her. You’re not even sure why you’re trying. Self-flagellation, maybe. If it hurts at least it’s real. If it hurts at least you can say you tried. 

Taskmaster plays on in the background, muted. You keep looking at the ceiling with eyes that go heavy and burning. You haven’t gotten much sleep lately, not that it matters. It’s not like you can get fired for being unproductive. Or like there’s anything going on in your dreams that you have any desire to see. 

(It goes like this: you are in bed with a woman. She will not let you see her face. You bring a hand to her shoulder, try to get her to turn and look at you. Her skin comes off as soon as your fingers touch it, sloughing away. She doesn’t move. There is blood on your hands as you try to put it back only for it to slide off again. It would almost be comical, but you can smell it, slick and copper and warm. You don’t know what she used to look like, just that her body is shaking, great heaving motions. Some nights she is laughing. Some nights she is crying. 

It goes like this: the Circus again. Danny is sitting next to you, safe. The audience is vast and jeering. Onstage, the Ringmaster waits. You can’t make out its face. Danny is not sitting next to you anymore. You don’t want to turn and look, so you don’t, but you can see the thing’s face now. Danny’s skin looks wrong, stretched over that plastic frame. He smiles, raises a hand, and beckons you forward.

It goes like this: you are in bed with a woman. You don’t try to look at her. You don’t need to. Sunlight streams in through your bedroom window. You think about taking her to the cafe a little down the road from your flat; it’s overpriced but their lattes are good enough that you’re willing to let it slide. She turns in your arms, and you still don’t look. You don’t need to. You know exactly who she is.

That one is the worst one.) 

The next morning is one of the rare days that you actually bother going into the assistants’ bullpen and sitting down at your desk. There are books for you to read here. Nothing that ever helps you, most of the time, but it feels better than doing nothing, and you’re certainly not going to read any goddamn statements. 

“Hi, Tim,” Martin hazards, a weak smile twitching onto his face. 

You don’t try to return it. “Hi, Martin,” you reply, flat and already exhausted. You aren’t trying to hurt him. You don’t do that, you don’t _want_ to do that, it’s just—you’re tired. 

He doesn’t flinch away, though, at your tone. If anything it seems to galvanize him. “How are you doing?” Insistently normal. You have to give him credit for tenacity if nothing else, this hopeless crusader. 

You scoff. “How do you think?” 

Martin worries at his lip, turns to his computer, starts typing. “Don’t know,” he says, clipped but aiming for false levity. “Haven’t seen you around enough to really get a read on it.” 

“Fair enough,” you say, a wry smile forcing its way onto your face. “You?” 

He exhales sharply. “I’m fine, Tim.” He’s stopped typing. Seems to be just staring at his screen. You wonder what he sees. 

You wait. It isn’t as though you’ll be interrupted; the office is empty. Nobody bothers showing up on time anymore. 

“I’m worried about you,” he says, genuine and a little quiet, and you have to laugh. It tastes mean in your mouth and it sounds mean coming out of it, but you can’t take it back now. There was a time when you could’ve given Martin a look and he would have understood you were sorry, you didn’t mean it, you weren’t laughing at him. There was a time when you could talk to somebody without drawing blood. There was a time when people liked you. There was a time when you cared if they did or not. 

You still care. You think. It hurts, seeing the Institute staff avoid you in the canteen, seeing Martin avoid your gaze, seeing Jon flinch ever so slightly whenever you talk to him. 

You wish you didn’t define your life in terms of what hurts and what doesn’t.

“I _am,”_ he snaps. 

“Yeah, I believe it,” you tell him. It’s not a lie; you don’t have the energy for that anymore, but it still doesn’t look like he believes you. 

“Well, alright then,” Martin says, snippy and just a bit mean. _Good. Be angry._ The persistent kindness, the defiant optimism, the willingness to throw himself into the fire to make people happy and comfortable, it grates on you now more than any passive-aggressiveness could. 

You sit there in silence again, the two of you. You share a desk with him. You didn’t always. You were paired with Sasha before she—well, before Prentiss. You were paired with the thing that was not Sasha after. You moved your stuff here when you found out about that. You thought it would bring some kind of comfort or camaraderie, this proximity to the only person you really have left. 

“Do you think Elias is here today?” you ask. 

Martin looks at you over his computer, brow furrowing. “I mean—yeah, probably? He’s the head of the Institute, Tim.” 

“Okay,” you say. 

“...why?” Martin asks. 

“Don’t worry about it.” 

_“Tim—”_

“I said don’t worry about it,” you say, making an effort to keep your voice gentle, and it must work because Martin slumps under your gaze a little bit. 

“I can’t help it,” he mumbles, digging the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. “I can’t—” 

“It’s okay, Martin,” you tell him. You’re remembering Martin, before everything, twenty-nine and nervous and sweet, fumbling his way through reports and citations and barely letting you help even when you knew he was out of his depth. Bringing you tea, laughing all anxious and delighted when you invite him to your Thursday night drink after work with Sasha and Jon. Soft-eyed, quick to smile. Shy, but that was alright. 

“What’s it for?” A heavy sigh. “You’re not trying to kill Elias too, are you?” 

You snort. “No. No point in that, it seems.” 

“Then _what?”_

“Martin, please don’t worry about me.” Martin opens his mouth to speak again, but you cut him off. “And don’t tell Jon about this. I’ll be fine.” 

And you get up and you leave. 

(You’re not even sure if you’re mad anymore. This feels like more than anger. It feels like what comes after the kind of fire that wrecks towns. Ashchoked air, earth scorched beyond recognition. Nothing will grow here for years, but nothing will burn here either. The ground is too scarred.) 

(You keep setting fires regardless. It’s better. It’s something. All you have to do is take fuel wherever you can find it.) 

(You decide you’re mad after all. It won’t make a fucking difference anyway.) 

The walk up to Elias’ office is a long one. The Archives are in the basement of the Institute and his office is on the third floor. You have plenty of time to think, climbing those stairs. Plenty of time to reconsider and back out, go back down to the library and pull out some book of mundane, dull fear to get lost in. You could talk to the receptionist there, some guy in his 40s who you think is named Benjamin. He’s interested in nineteenth-century architecture or is at least knowledgeable on the subject, and he doesn’t seem too fazed by you, even on the days that you barely offer a grunt in reply to his greeting. You never talk to him about anything real, but that’s fine. You don’t want that. That’s the kind of thing you start to miss, when your world is just where you live and where you work. Those little interactions. The woman in the same line to get coffee, laughing unexpectedly loudly at something on her phone and looking around to see if anyone heard (you did, and you smiled). The teenager holding the door for you on the way into your apartment complex’s lobby. The nod of acknowledgment to acquaintances you pass by. The idle conversation you make with cashiers. 

It’s exhausting, only talking about the end of the world. It’s exhausting. 

You don’t have to knock on the door, but you do anyway. Sometimes it’s nice to pretend he isn’t watching. 

“Come in,” says the voice from within. So you do. When you walk in, he’s already looking at you and smiling in a way that is meant to be blandly polite but is so clearly just smug. There’s no surprise in his eyes, but you really didn’t expect there to be. 

You return it with a grin of your own, somewhere in between devil-may-care and cold. “Hey, boss.”

“Hello, Tim,” he says, still oilslick smooth, still with that fixed curl of the lip. “What brings you to my office?” You hate the way he says it, the pleasant smile collapsing into a smirk, the eyes round and unblinking like a snake’s. You don’t want to give him the satisfaction of glaring at him, but you’re sure it’s too late for that. 

Questions set your teeth on edge; you can feel how the power crackles through your lips and tongue and throat like static electricity and you _hate_ it, all of it. “You know why. Don’t even pretend you’re not looking into my mind right now.” 

“Well. Perhaps. But we wouldn’t want to have any misunderstandings.” 

You sneer. “Fine.” A better man than Elias would flinch at that, the crack of the word as it splits the air. _Fine,_ you say, and then hesitate anyway. Is it cowardice, or just the petty, useless satisfaction of withholding answers from this malicious thing that craves them so badly?

He watches you from across the desk, hands folded primly. An imperious arch of the eyebrow. 

You take a breath and exhale it out, sharp and percussive. “You can… _push_ knowledge into people’s heads, right? That’s what you did to Melanie?” She hadn’t talked about it much, not that you blame her. You’d seen how she came back down into the archives, eyes red, shoulders still shaking. Offering only a glare when Basira asked if she was alright. She’d explained later on—know your enemy, et cetera—but kept it curt. You stopped yourself from asking more. You, at least, are willing to spare people that decency. 

The smile is back and decidedly cruel. “That’s part of it, yes. It’s a little more complex than _that,_ but—” 

“I don’t care. I want the real Sasha. All the memories that really happened. With her. The actual her. With her face.” Clench and unclench your fists; God only knows what about this situation you think you can fight. “Happy?” 

He leans back in his chair. “No. I don’t take any joy in this.” You snort. His eyes are keen and inhumanly bright when he looks at you, glowing from the inside out, and whatever you might think of Jon, at least Jon doesn’t look at you like he wants to devour you whole just to see how you will hurt. “Even I have no way of knowing, as it stands right now, exactly how the Not-Them has altered your mind. Some things may have been struck away entirely. Some might be absolutely unchanged. Some may still exist, but—twisted to fit with the illusion it created for you. Whatever it took for you to justify it.” He traces a finger over the fine wood grain of the desk and says with no small amount of relish, “I’m not sure how this knowledge would affect you. I imagine the other set of memories given to you by the Not-Them wouldn’t go away. More likely, they would exist alongside each other, the face of the real Sasha through all those years right next to the puppet pretending to be her.” Elias shakes his head, the perfect picture of mock sympathy. “It really sounds rather painful, if you ask me.” 

You don’t even hesitate. “I don’t care," you repeat, and even you are taken aback by how your voice shakes, how your shoulders tense. “I _need_ to know.” 

Elias laughs at that, a low, surprised thing. _“Very_ good. Perhaps you’ll make a servant of the Eye yet, Tim.” 

You grin at him for that, ugly and wide. You’ve been told more than once that your smile is your most attractive feature. It’s been a while. People avert their eyes these days. Guess it doesn’t take much to know when a smile is more fangs than anything else. Much to your gratification, something changes in his expression, goes steely. 

“You’ll do it, then?”

Elias looks at you. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t stretch out a hand. His eyes don’t burn bright green. All he does is look at you. For a moment, nothing happens at all except for you staring back, daring him to blink first.

And then there’s that hum of power again rattling in your teeth, this time so deep and loud and thrumming it shakes you to your marrow, and you are falling, falling, falling. 

It’s like being dashed against rocks, like something that’s made its home in your chest for years is digging its way out, like your eyes are being clawed open. Like—like—

An office holiday party with an open bar and she’s beside you, laughing at her own joke, hair falling into her face, and her cheeks are flushed from either the champagne or the embarrassment. Sasha, Sasha with long dark hair and warm brown skin and a freckled nose that scrunches up when you make a particularly atrocious pun and dark eyes a color you haven’t quite figured out; you catch yourself staring at them in quiet moments when she’s not looking and trying to decide. You kind of zone out for a few minutes, but—

 _“Timothyyy,”_ she complains. “Tell Jon he’s wrong ab—” 

“You’re wrong,” you say to Jon without hesitation, who scowls. 

“You don’t even know what we’re arguing about,” he mutters, cradling his own champagne flute closer to his chest. 

“Don’t have to!” you reply cheerfully. “Sasha’s never been wrong in her life, ever! About anything!” Jon rolls his eyes and huffs overdramatically, Sasha beams at you, and you grin back at both of them—

(Like the walls in your mind are tumbling down and everything is racing at itself from either side. Sasha, with light brown hair and blue eyes, stern-faced and cool, making quiet jokes that are just a little too sharp-edged, but you laughed because she was your coworker and at one point you—)

Early on, a few months before you started working in the archives, you hooked up with her. Once. You didn’t think about it much beforehand; she was pretty and funny and smarter than almost anybody else you’d ever met, and you were fast friends and more than happy with that. 

But you’re both staying late, paired on the same research assignment, some stuff about demons that you both think is total bullshit. It’s a living, though, and the company’s more than good enough. You make an off-color joke about _The Exorcist_ and she says “Oh my God, Tim, you can’t joke about that, the kid started eating his own _skin,”_ and then, after your mumbled apology, she mutters “And the reference doesn’t even hold up. If you’re going to be disrespectful, the joke should at least make sense,” and you laugh, and she hisses at you to _shut up, Tim._

“Make me,” you say with an exaggerated wink, not expecting anything out of it, but she looks at you for a second with an unreadable expression and then does. Make you, that is. Very effectively. Her hands are just a little too firm on your jaw and the back of your neck, nails biting into your skin, and you lean into the kiss happily. There’s no way to tell how long it lasts; you lose track after the first thirty seconds, and honestly you have far better things to focus on than counting how much time has passed—like how her hair feels between your fingers and the little noise she makes against your mouth when you pull her closer. You’re smiling wide when she breaks away— _”All this time and that's what pushes you over the edge? The goddamn Exorcist?”_ — and she shoves at your shoulder for looking so smug, and you ask if she wants to go back to your flat and she heaves a mock-aggrieved sigh and says yes, fingers fidgeting at the wrinkled collar of your shirt. 

You ask her again, just to make sure. She smiles soft and kisses you again and says yes, quietly. 

So you take her home. It’s good. It’s more than good, and you tell her as much when you’re sure she’s already drifted off nestled against your chest, her head over your heart, because you doubt she’d know how to respond. Or maybe you just don’t want to know what she would say. At any rate, you pull her a little bit closer, and you dream of nothing at all. 

She’s gone in the morning. You’d expected as much, but your chest still feels heavy when you wake up to an empty bed. For a moment, you had thought she’d stay, that something about you would be stronger than her logic. Foolishly, you think _wouldn’t I be enough? Wouldn’t I be worth the risk?_ But of course you know how stupid it would be for someone like her to get tangled up with her coworker. If anyone found out, it would probably fuck up her chances for a promotion, and you know how much she wants that job in the archives. 

The next week is awkward. You’d expected that too, as soon as you opened your eyes and saw her missing. What you hadn’t expected was how much it hurt, eating lunch without her or opening your mouth to call out a joke to her from the break room before remembering she doesn’t want to hear it or noticing that she hasn’t met your eyes in three days. You want to bring her coffee or something just to get a chance to talk to her, but you don’t know how she’ll react and you’d rather not risk it. After four full workdays, though, it’s too much. You can talk to Jon just fine—he’s your other desk partner, of course you can talk to him, plus you genuinely like the guy—and you’ve got other friends in the department, but. It’s Sasha. 

Before she comes into work you set a neon green sticky note on her desk reading _we okay?_ in thick black marker. As much as you hate just flat-out _asking_ about it, you know better than anyone how Sasha can’t stand to waste time interpreting emotional subtext. An actual conversation would probably be even worse. And God, you hope it’s not the presumptuous or otherwise the wrong move to broach the subject like this so soon, it’s just that you _can’t_ anymore. You’ve spent longer stretches of time not talking to her, obviously, especially when the two of you are on vacation, but also because you aren’t attached at the hip by any means. You’re an adult; you’ve got a life entirely outside your career and the friends you’ve made there, and she does too. Probably more so, honestly. But you miss her anyway. You don’t even have to think about that to know it’s true. 

Waiting for her to see the note is hell. 

You stare determinedly at your monitor, which is faithfully displaying the same empty Word doc it has been for the last half hour. You’ve got a report on grey lady manifestations due this evening that you’ve been procrastinating on for the past three days, but JSTOR’s been fiddly and, really, at this point it’s hard to care much. You’re not here for generic spooks anyway. You’re not here for friends, either, but you’re well past the point of no return on that front; right now Jon’s looking at you with judgement that’s doing a rather poor job of disguising his obvious concern at the way you’ve been white-knuckling your desk. 

Finally, though, Sasha strides in from the break room, wielding her first cup of coffee of the day, and sits down at her desk. You keep staring at your computer screen but watch her out of the corner of your eye, forcing your fingers to relax and rest lightly on the plastic surface of the desk. 

You can pinpoint the exact moment she sees the note—her hands go still on her keyboard and she just looks at it and then up at you, and it takes every shred of resistance in your body not to try and parse out her expression. She picks the paper up, writes something down on it, and passes it back to you. Even then, you don’t dare to look her in the eyes, and you almost physically jolt at the contact when her fingers brush yours, like this is goddamn _Pride and Prejudice._ Still. You take the note back and flip it over to read it. In her handwriting: _yeah :),_ the smiley-face big and a little wobbly. You’d hoped as much, but the relief still hits like a freight train, and there’s nothing to be done about how the smile splits your face, wide and bright. She catches your eye and laughs a little under her breath, shaking her head. 

“You want to get lunch?” she asks. “I’ll buy.” 

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I’m a big boy, Sasha, I can pay my own way!” you protest halfheartedly, but she waves you off. 

“Seriously, Tim, not a problem.” 

“Thank God,” you grin. “I didn’t actually bring any money today.” She rolls her eyes at you, and the normalcy of her mock-exasperation makes something knotted up in your chest all week finally untangle itself. You get back back to your job, then, and easily manage to finish up the grey lady thing on time. Probably not your best work, but it doesn’t have to be. You know nobody reads this shit anyway. 

Things aren’t perfect after that. The elephant in the room didn’t get up and walk away because of a couple words on a Post-It. But despite the awkwardness, things get fixed. The friendship goes back to being easy. Work at just about anything long enough and it’ll straighten itself out one way or another—at least, that seems to be Sasha’s feelings on the vast majority of life. Eventually, you get to a point where you can joke about it tentatively, and the relief on her face is palpable just before it slides into overdramatic annoyance. She slips into the role nicely, the bored debutante rejecting the suitors falling at her feet, and you’re happy to play the insistent, moonstruck idiot chasing her. It just becomes part of your usual banter, and if your side of the patter comes a little too naturally, that’s your own business. Any heartache’s worth it anyway if she keeps laughing at you the way she does, eyes crinkling up at the corners and hand coming up to cover her mouth like it’ll stop the way the sound rings out, bright and loud.

(The memories are so disjointed. They fit in your mind all wrong, jagged, like trying to piece together a broken window from its shards. And you are the glass and you are the fist that shattered it and the bent frame and the blood dripping from the knuckles, and something has papered over your recollections of the woman you loved, the woman who was your best friend and your confidante and, hell, your _research partner,_ because that mattered too. All of it mattered with her. Every part. But some of what you remember is unchanged except for the different face, and some of it is altered only in how she responded or what jokes made her laugh or the way she said goodbye, and some of it just feels wrong, and some of it is gone altogether. Just—gone. After Prentiss attacked, whenever you’d tried to think about why she was acting like this now, what she was like before, all you could get was a vague sense of _well, Sasha’s always been like this._ Calm and critical. Distant. Amusing, but never actually engaging. You thought _but that’s my best friend,_ you thought _there’s no reason she would shut me out like this._ But if you tried to analyze it more than that, the concept slipped away. You even forgot that you told her about Danny—oh my God, _you told her about Danny.)_

The sofa in her living room is floral and awful. Pale pink, red, and yellow roses on a white background gone cream-grey from age. Dull green stripes throughout. It’s apparently inherited from her gran, but that doesn’t stop you from teasing her about it relentlessly the second you got into her flat. She rolls her eyes but lets you mock it as you take off your shoes at the door, a smile twitching on her lips. Her usual facade of general long-suffering amusement is a little weaker than usual after a few hours at the pub after work. Neither of you are drunk, necessarily, but you’re not sober either, loose enough to laugh louder than usual at bad jokes. Loose enough that she swings herself onto the couch with you and tangles your legs together without hesitation, all warmth and easy companionship that nearly makes you fumble midsentence, but you’re nothing if not adaptable. 

“Seriously though, this couch looks like the final resting place of, like, eight of my grandmother’s nightdresses.”

She kicks you in the shin and ignores your affronted _ow._ “Don’t speak ill of the dead. Those nightdresses had _families._ Besides, this might be my taste in interior design, what the hell do _you_ know?” 

You look around the living room pointedly—all tastefully matched furniture to go with the cosy vibe of the exposed brick wall and warm lighting. With the exception of the couch, sticking out like a rose-patterned sore thumb. “I think I know plenty!” 

She arches an eyebrow. “What do you _really_ know, though? There isn’t any truth in the grand scheme, not really. Too much is always changing. For all you know I think this sofa is the peak of fashion.” 

You have to scoff at that. “Jesus, who are you, _Nietzsche?_ If you’re gonna start spouting philosophy at midnight, the _least_ you can do keep his perspectivism bullshit out of—” 

“God, no. Don’t even mention his name. I’m just saying—” 

_“Stuff is real, Sasha!_ Things happen! I know things have happened in your life! They’ve happened in mine!” You cast around for a bit. “One time I ate a worm as a kid. I wasn’t even dared to, I just did it. That is a _universal_ truth. Can’t dispute that.” 

“Gross,” she grins. “Fair, though.” Thinks a little. “I cheated on a physics exam when I was sixteen and didn’t tell anyone.” 

You laugh, genuinely surprised. “You, Sasha James, cheated on an exam?” 

She groans, throwing her head back so it flops over the arm of the couch. “Listen, that last unit was hard, and Kieren Davies and I had a whole thing going over who got the best marks. I had to do what was necessary.” 

“But your _integrity!_ Your _honor!_ I’m appalled, Miss James, simply appalled. _”_ That gets you another groan. 

“I know, I know. Truly one of my greatest regrets in life: _not_ failing physics. Didn’t you ever cheat on a test?” 

“Not really.” (Cue yet another defeated, miserable noise.) “Uh…. one time I was an accidental homewrecker, though. I dated someone in university who _said_ she was single. Didn’t even figure out she was actually married until her husband came back to the flat _screaming._ Most stressful day of my life right there.” 

“Total mood-killer too, sounds like.” 

You snort. “Yeah, no shit.” 

There’s a brief silence. 

“Well, I played the viola as a kid,” she offers, finally lifting her head. 

“Hang on, I confide in you about my heartbreaking romantic misadventures and you tell me about your time in your _primary school orchestra—”_

It’s hard to say how that, the harmless trade of information, turns into you struggling against the choke of your throat, nails biting deep into your palm. Half your face is pressed into the abhorrent rose pattern, smelling of dust and that unremovable old-lady perfume. _There’s_ a universal truth. You wish you could close your eyes against the reality of it all. Thinking about it, you hadn’t told anybody the whole story before then. You got a grief counselor after Danny, of _course_ you did, but you didn’t give Jessica any of the story as it happened. She’d just think you were speaking in elaborate metaphors anyway. Or think you killed him yourself and were spinning mad tales to cover it up. 

Sasha, though. Sasha watches you, something in her eyes you can’t quite pinpoint. When you talk about the architecture of the auditorium, mention Robert Smirke, you can see the flare of recognition, connecting the name immediately to the books that scatter your desk. It fills you with a fondness you can’t really give words to, her trying to put together the pieces that make you up. You keep talking nonetheless, your own voice ringing in your ears: the maybe-Danny figure on the stage. The clown dragging itself across the floor. The skin ripping away so clean and quiet. Standing outside in the chill of the night and feeling none of it, none of it at all. 

It occurs to you that you are crying, and you try to turn away completely. Muffle the strangled, terrible noises somehow coming from your mouth against the musty fabric. But warm fingers touch your forearm lightly and you whip around to look, inhale shuddering harsh and sharp. Sasha holds up her hands, _not a threat, just here, just here,_ and you—you don’t think you’re panicking, you don’t think anything at all, it just all hit so suddenly, and—

After a bit more time, Sasha very slowly puts her hand on your arm again and sweeps her thumb over your skin, back and forth. 

“Okay?” she asks, voice quiet, but in the silence it is deafening. You nod jerkily and try to slow down your breathing. That, at least, you know how to do. You can keep count. Over and over. Finally you manage to steady yourself, center back down around that point of contact. 

“Thank you,” you say. Then, “I’m sorry. I, uh. Hadn’t told anybody before now, I guess.” 

Sasha nods, teeth worrying at the inside of her cheek. After a moment: “Is it—would you be okay with me hugging you?” You don’t even answer, just fold yourself into her arms and let her hold on. “Don’t apologize, Tim,” she says into your hair. “That’s awful. And I’m sorry.” You’ve heard variations on too many platitudes to count, enough to make you want to scream, but she states it like a fact. It’s better like that. He’s gone, and that’s awful. There’s really no other way to say it. Every time you think about the reality of him being just _gone,_ the fury and loss and pointlessness of it all rise up in you like bile. You think maybe she knows that, even if she doesn’t understand it. You think she wants to understand. She can’t. But the wanting to—it almost brings you to tears all over again. Sasha James, who avoids everyone’s feelings, including her own, like the plague. Sasha James, holding you so tightly on her ugly sofa at one in the morning like you aren’t staining her shirt with tears and snot, murmuring something too soft to hear against your temple. 

(Elias is saying something. That’s his thing, isn’t it? The evil monologues meant to hammer the terror and loss into your skull along with the devastation of Knowing. 

You can’t hear it over—) 

She’s reciting the opening lines to _The Princess Bride_ along with Peter Falk like she wrote them herself, smiling self-consciously but clearly proud and certain. Apparently it’s the first movie her parents ever took her to see in the cinema. She was six or seven at the time because her parents weren’t the sort to take young children out in public where they weren’t wanted, but they’d finally decided she was old enough to sit still in a dark room for an hour and a half. The endeavor was a success, clearly. If Sasha’s to be believed, the first thing she did upon getting home was asking for a copy of the book the thing was based on. 

“Didn’t take you for a romantic,” you remark. 

All that earns you is a glare and an aggrieved “I’m _not._ I just appreciate good cinema,” but you look over at her once _As you wish_ is brought up and she’s not even looking at you back, instead watching Farm Boy raptly. You wonder if that’s how she sees romance: quiet, unflinching devotion. Survival and servitude and love all rolled up together. You wonder if she could see that in you. 

You’ve both seen the film before, though it’s obvious from the start that she’s watched it several more times than you. Still, there’s a comfort to its mutual familiarity—saying Inigo’s mantra in unison, snapping _inconceivable!_ along with Vizzini, watching that duel by the Cliffs of Insanity with your heart in your throat despite knowing every beat of the scene. Sasha’s curled up against your side by the end of it, your arm slung around her easily. And that’s really what it is with her, you think. Easy. Friends, partners, whatever; as long as you’re together, you’re good. 

(“You don’t even know her anymore,” you can almost make out. “That likely hurts the most. Stealing that deep, fierce joy of knowing somebody the way nobody else does, down to the tiniest details. But the Not-Them took that too, didn’t it?” 

It did. You know that now, because—) 

“Don’t tell me: Costa got your coffee order wrong again,” you deadpan as Sasha stalks down into the Archives. 

She heaves a sigh, flopping down into the chair next to you and slamming the to-go cup down on the desk (a safe distance away from any relevant papers or electronics, obviously). “I don’t get what’s _so hard_ about honey and cinnamon in black coffee. It’s not like I’m asking for a lot. But no, they either ignore it entirely or overdo it with the cinnamon, and then it’s completely _undrinkable—”_

“If it’s so important, why don’t you just bring the extra stuff to the break room and add them later? Or just make coffee at home?” 

“I’ve got to have _some_ luxuries in my life, Tim,” she grumbles. 

You shrug. “I’m just saying—there’s probably something better out there than chain coffee.” 

Hard to deny that, and she doesn’t try. She keeps complaining about it every morning until she surrenders a week later and starts just ordering lattes instead. For your part, you start keeping a jar of cinnamon and a jar of honey by your French press. Doesn’t hurt to dream, and if nothing else, you surprise her on her birthday with coffee that’s apparently a bit on the sweet side but just fine by her. Lukewarm praise at best, but you catch her smiling down at the mug out of the corner of your eye for the rest of the day. 

(—because the thing that sat next to you at Sasha’s desk and was not Sasha drank green tea, no sugar. Had never taken a course on Javascript or Python or SQL or whatever the current coding language fad was just to see what everyone was talking about. Didn’t understand the appeal of movies. Said she was, after everything, dating a man you’d never so much as heard of. Hardly ever invited you to her flat and certainly didn’t tell you about her weirdest exes or the stuff she thought was maybe supernatural or the stuff she thought was absolute bullshit or the reason her favorite color was sunset orange or the hell that practical research had been for her or Bast, her childhood dog—God, Sasha was a dog person, you wouldn’t have even known—)

(“It changed your life, this Not-Sasha’s presence. You know, I think that may have been part of what drove Jon to his, ah, _instability_ following the Corruption’s attack. The feeling of something—some _one,_ I suppose, in this case—being simply... wrong.”) 

Another partnered research assignment, another late night. The statement would’ve been dull but for the mention of Smirke; you’d asked Jon to help out with the follow-up on this one as soon as he mentioned the architect’s name. You were almost regretting it now that it was well past the time the Institute technically closed, and it’s not like Jon had asked the two of you nicely to stay late. “Yeah, but we love him,” Sasha says, and you roll your eyes and bitch about how love can conquer a lot but not having to stay at work til eleven, but of course you love him anyway; you were in research together, you and him go out drinking each Thursday, you stay at his flat overnight sometimes if you didn’t want to make the full commute back to yours, he lets you rib him the way he didn’t let anybody else, of course she’s right—

(Do you still love him? Your answer changes every time you think about it. You love him the way you love one of your own limbs gone rotten and gangrenous, amputated by necessity, its absence a presence all its own. Or maybe the way a death row prisoner loves a cellmate. Or maybe just the way a ruined, furious man loves his friend.) 

(You realized on some level how all this would end at the exact moment you realized he was watching your house. For a moment, you could see everything: the downward spiral, the bridges not burning but crumbling. Martin would say that’s when the two of you started fighting. He’s wrong. It’s when you stopped. You couldn’t fight to hold onto him anymore, even after all you’d suffered together. Not after that.) 

(“It must have been disorienting for you, this last year or so. So much has changed. Do you ever wonder how different things could have been if she had lived? 

“Do you wonder how different things could have been if you hadn’t gotten her _killed?”)_

The night before Prentiss attacks, the two of you go back to your flat together. You make her dinner, just a basic stir fry, while she chats idly about her reread of _Dracula_ (“Hey, you think I could pull off the vampiric look, Sash?” “Nah, not even with the name. You’re the least intimidating guy I know. Other than Martin, I guess,”) and the statement Jon’s planning to record tomorrow (“The one with the pot that stole a guy’s husband, right? God. Feels like a low blow even for an eldritch monster. Is nothing sacred?” “Apparently not! Listen, if _I_ ever get stolen by a weird pot you gotta—”). You eat it together on your couch, a dull, solid olive green thing that’s still miles better than hers. She insists that you take down some of the good wine from your cabinet, and you sigh and put up token resistance but acquiesce within thirty seconds. She is warm and golden across the sofa, which is just small enough that your legs overlap each other in a clumsy pile. On the way to put her dishes in the sink, she asks if you’re drunk. You answer no, you aren’t a kid and it’ll take a hell of a lot more than half a glass of red to get you anywhere. She smiles, puts her plate and glass in the sink, circles back to the living room, and kisses you. You don’t question it or hesitate for even a moment before kissing back. 

When she pulls back, you raise your eyebrows. “Thought you said it was a one-time thing.” 

She huffs out a breath you can feel against your lips. “Yeah, well. It was bound to happen again sometime.” You grin and reach up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and she smiles back. “Besides. I like you.” 

“More romantic words were never spoken,” you say, and you mean it. 

(“You must have been so confused after the attack. After all, you had plans together. You always did. Movie nights, dinners, drinks after work. She was your best friend, wasn’t she? The closest person in the world to you after Danny. The one thing _truly_ keeping you tethered. 

“You explained the distance away with trauma at first. Reasonable enough, I suppose. Perhaps it was the aftermath of the fear she experienced that day keeping her from visiting you in the hospital or even texting to explain her absence. Perhaps that was why her messages were clipped and subdued, even when she did start replying again. 

“Following that, I assume you believed it was the old awkwardness—yet another hookup that turned out to be ill-advised after all. That or the scars. Maybe the scars were why she couldn’t stand to look at you. Then you circled back to trauma, some odd countering response to Jon’s behavior. 

“It’s funny, isn’t it, what our minds will do to rationalize what we find too awful to even consider?”) 

You’re late back from lunch, but it seems like nobody else is around to notice. Weird but not that weird, all things considered. Who knows, maybe it’s another worm-siege strategy meeting, right? So when you see the tape recorder lying on the ground, well. There’s no way you’re not taking that opportunity. 

Midway through perhaps your best Jon imitation to date, you hear the worms. By then it’s already too late. 

_“Tim, look out!”_

Your head jerks up. “Sasha?” 

She’s racing toward you. “Behind you! Run!” On instinct, you whip around to see—it. Jane Prentiss. Staggering forward zombielike yet inevitable, groaning out _something_ over the deafening, horrible squirm of advancing worms. You’re not even sure what you’re trying to do when you start advancing on the corpse of a woman, hole-riddled and rasping, but it’s probably for the best that Sasha tackles you to the ground with a shout of your name. You can feel the worms underneath you, the wet squelch of their bodies being crushed, but there’s no time to be disgusted. Sasha’s already dragging you to your feet and pulling you forward, hissing curses under her breath. 

“C’mon, c’mon,” she mumbles, looking around frantically. Her fingers are so tight around yours that her knuckles have gone white, and the worms are everywhere, and you can’t think over the noise of squirming, and the shelf in front of you is covered in the things, and it’s about to collapse, and— 

_“Run!”_ you shout over the din, would-be martyr, and her gaze snaps to you, dark eyes wide but focused. “I’ll be fine, Sash, just get out of here! Get help!” She hesitates just for a second, looking between the worms and you and the door. Sasha, reckless and awkward and beautiful and too smart for her own good. Sasha, who fled safety just to protect you.

You give her the most encouraging smile you can, and she lets go of your hand. And you run away. 

You run away. 

You know what happens after that. 

Strangely, you aren’t aware that your legs are shaking until your knees buckle altogether and you hit the ground with a dull crack of bone. The pain barely even registers, though, nothing compared to the firesplit pain in your skull, white-hot and terrible. Elias was right, you think distantly, with no small amount of hatred. The memories given—no, _returned—_ to you don’t overlay the false ones planted by the thing that was not Sasha. They exist alongside, contradictory and right and wrong all at once, each face and fact blurring into another, and it _hurts._ Emotionally, yes, down to your core, but physically too, like your head is being pulled apart and crushed together in the same moment. 

Still, through vision blurred with tears, you continue to meet Elias’ gaze. His eyes are cold, cold blue, and though his face is calm, you can see in your periphery how his hands are clenched on top of his desk. You don’t stop looking at him, even as your skull throbs with every heartbeat, even as your eyes burn both from tears and the strain of not blinking, until finally, _finally,_ he breaks eye contact with a grunt of effort and squeezes his eyes shut. The twisted wave of satisfaction that sweeps through you at that tiny gesture of weakness almost makes the agony worth it. With that motion, the memories are allowed to recede from the forefront of your mind into the subconscious. You come back to yourself slowly. Your hands are shaking and you feel lightheaded, so you breathe in and out. Keep count through. The ringing in your ears subsides as well; it’s a mystery to you how you even managed to hear Elias speak over it. 

“So,” Elias says, perfectly composed once more. “Would you say you are satisfied, Tim?” You begin the struggle to your feet, legs trembling so fiercely they can hardly support your weight. “Do you believe that’s sufficient closure for you before you go off on a mission you intend to kill you? Do you feel better knowing what she was _really_ like?” He laughs. “What was it that she insisted? ‘There’s no such thing as a real you’?”

“Shut up,” you snarl, and Elias gazes back coolly. 

“I think it’s rather comforting to know there is such thing as a ‘real you’, if only insofar as there’s such thing as something so profoundly _not_ you.” He keeps smiling at you like he expects you to join in, then sighs in paternalistic disappointment and drops the mask of congeniality. “Tim, I have indulged you today because it will be more useful for you to think of me as an ally rather than an enemy.” 

“Tough fucking luck.” 

“Mm. Regardless, you would do well to remember this is what you _wanted._ You asked _me_ for this.” 

You sneer, lay the sarcasm on thick. “Well, thank you so much, _boss._ Tell me, how could I ever repay you for your unending generosity?” 

“Keep this conversation in mind the next time you’re fantasizing about stabbing through my voicebox or gouging out my eyes. It wouldn’t do for you to go the same way as Melanie, and I certainly don’t wish to inflict any more psychological damage on you than I must.” 

“Benevolent of you.” 

His eyes are cold, and he will not look away. “However. One more threat, Tim. One more attempt on my life. One more unnecessary endangerment of Jon or the cause of the Institute—well. All I’ve shown you so far is your own memories. But it would be no more difficult for me to show you other truths. How do you think it would feel to see how the real Sasha died? What they did with her body?” The knife’s blade of a smile. “What they did with her _skin?”_

“Stop it,” you grit out. “Stop, or I swear I’ll—” The dry sob, building in your throat for God knows how long, chokes you, and you can’t say anything more. 

Elias leans back in his chair. “You’re welcome to leave now. I believe you’ve done quite enough for today. You ought to go home. Get some rest. After all, you have your suicide mission to prepare for.” 

You don’t dignify him with a response. You just leave. 

You go back to your flat. Lie down on the sofa this time. It’s not comfortable, but it isn’t about comfort. The ceiling is still cracked when you stare up at it. Hairline fractures. You can hear your neighbor’s television through the wall. When you flip your own on, just to fill the dead quiet of the room, it plays only static. Fucking figures. 

(It goes like this: You are in bed with a woman. You love her. She loves you too. Tonight is just another beginning in a long series of beginnings. When you hold her, long-haired and freckles and a smile curling easy into your neck, there’s no urgency to it. 

“You gonna stick around for breakfast this time? I’ll make sure the coffee’s how you like it.” 

Mumbled right up against your jaw: “If you can get the coffee right, I’ll stay however long you like.”) 

The worst part is the gratitude. Your head is pounding. Your memories don’t make sense. You stare up at the cracked ceiling and your mind is a mess of two faces, two lives, two losses, and all you can feel is a sick, overwhelming thankfulness. At least you know her face. At least you know what’s gone. 

It’s a strange responsibility, being the only person able to mourn. 

You remember her. You don’t cry. You don’t think there are any tears left in you. 

You don’t think there’s anything left in you at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> pyrrhic victory (n): a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat.
> 
> thank you so much for reading. you can find me on tumblr [@boneroutes](https://boneroutes.tumblr.com), and please drop a comment/kudos if you feel inclined!


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